Atheneion’s Researches and Studies on the Ancient World

Readings

Reading the classics and their great interpreters may always lead you to new discoveries; it may guide you through new meditations on the controversial but fascinating aspects of life and their meanings. Here I would like to gather and post some simple commented suggestions about books to be read. I totally rely on your personal taste, interest and inspiration that will assist your selection and I am positive whichever title you will suggest, it will be a wonderful experience to share it with our reader.

Werner Jaeger – PaideiaA classic 3 volumes comprehensive analysis of the Ancient Greek world. I vol. Archaic Greece: The mind of Athens. II vol. In search of the Divine Centre. III vol. The conflict of cultural ideals in the age of Plato.

Cecil Maurice Bowra – The Greek experienceA magnificent evocation of the Greeks from Homer to the fall of Athens in 404 BC. With a kind of brilliant imaginative sympathy and knowledge, he evokes the life, the thought, the ideals, the philosophy, the virtues and the faults of these extraordinary people

Bruno Snell – The discovery of the mind – European thinking begins with the Greeks. They have made what it is: our only way of thinking; its authority, in the Western world, is undisputed. When we concern ourselves with the sciences and philosophy, we use this thought quite independently of its historical ties, to focus upon that which’s constant and unconditioned: upon truth; and with itself we hope to grasp the unchanging principles of this life.

Jean-Pierre Vernant – Myth and Thought among the GreeksA collection of essays whose themes are seemingly disparate… Myth and Thought among the Greeks owes its unity to Vernant’s innovative methodology…. This book remains today a passionate and profound inquiry of the Greeks, both distant from and near to us in the evolution of their structures and mental activities

Jean-Pierre Vernant – The GreeksThe Greeks offers the most complete portraits available of typical Greek personages from Athens to Sparta, Arcadia, Thessaly and Epirus to the city-states of Asia Minor, to the colonies of the Black Sea, southern Italy, and Sicily.

Jean-Pierre Vernant – Myth and Society in Ancient GreeceThis scholarly collection of studies follows Vernant’s Myth and Thought and Myth and Tragedy, offering further insights into Greek social structure, concepts of slave production and economic growth, and the efforts of myths to define and shape social choices.

Jean-Pierre Vernant et alt. – Ancestors of the WestWith Ancestor of the West, three distinguished French historians reveal the story of the birth of writing and reason, demonstrating how the logical religious structures of Near Eastern and Mesopotamian cultures served as precursors to those of the West.